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As many of you know, I've been anticipating the arrival of the Nokia Lumia 1520. It is the first Windows phone with a 1080p display. It is also the first 6" Windows phone. The first quad-core Windows phone. The first Windows phone with 4x HAAC microphones for superb audio capture even under loud conditions such as a concert, and also stereo/positional audio capture. It is the first Windows phone that has that has attracted so much attention since the Lumia 1020 and its massive 41mp camera. But, alas, it is also one of the last Lumia devices to be made by Nokia prior to the takeover by Microsoft.

Most of the amazing features of this phone were known to me throughout the many leaks that have come out over the past few weeks. 12 hours of Wifi browsing? 25 hours of talk time? Windows 8 GDR3? Built-in wireless charging? All great features. There's one bit that eluded me. Most rumours were claiming that Nokia would equip the Lumia 1520 with a Samsung-made Super AMOLED HD display. There are pros and cons to that. Over-exaggerated colours and deep blacks do make the screens more fun, even if inaccurate. But the downside is less realistic colour reproduction. Movies and pictures would be off as a result. And visibility in sunlight would be quire poor unless even more power was pumped into the backlight, which again means less battery life.

Nokia caught me off guard by using an IPS display, using their own deep black technology and the ever wonderful PureMotion 60hz tech, and by introducing a technology I had read about years ago during the release of the iPhone 3GS. There was a company back then that posed a question. And that was...why are we just increasing backlight power to increase visibility? It really doesn't help too much, and it kills the battery. They then did a demo of a screen that had the entire content of the display adjusted on a per-pixel level, to look best under various lighting conditions. This is all some very magical stuff that should become standard equipment on most high end phones in the near future.

The best way I can explain it is this way. If you're playing a dark game that's intended to be dark, with monsters hiding in corners and jumping out at you, increasing the brightness on your monitor doesn't help you much. Because you're just shining even more light behind a set of black pixels. But once you increase the gamma or brightness through the in-game menu, all those dark black areas become gray and quite visible as a result. Apical does that same sort of adjustment, but in a far more sophisticated manner, and on a per-pixel level as opposed to a full-screen effect, in direct response to the light hitting the screen. This is yet another reason to be excited about the upcoming Lumia 1520!